Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician and composer best known as the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the alternative rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, Greenwood also plays instruments including the bass guitar, piano, viola, and drums, and is a prominent player of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. He works with electronic techniques such as programming, sampling and looping, and writes music software used by Radiohead. He described his role in the band as an arranger, helping to transform singer Thom Yorke's demos into full songs. He has been named one of the greatest guitarists of all time by publications including the NME,Rolling Stone and Spin.

Greenwood was born in Oxford, England. As a boy he played in youth orchestras, and he is the only Radiohead member to have studied music theory. Along with his older brother, Radiohead bassist Colin, he attended Abingdon School, where he met the other members of Radiohead. The youngest of the group, Greenwood was the last to join, playing first keyboards and harmonica but soon becoming lead guitarist. He abandoned a degree in music when Radiohead signed to Parlophone; their debut single "Creep" was distinguished by Greenwood's aggressive guitar work, and Radiohead have gone on to achieve critical acclaim and sales of over 30 million albums.[1]

Jonny Greenwood was born on 5 November 1971 in Oxford, England.[2] He is the younger brother of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, who is two years older. His father served in the army as a bomb disposal expert.[3][4] When he was a child, Greenwood's family would listen to a small number of cassettes in their car, including Mozart’s horn concertos, the musicals Flower Drum Song and My Fair Lady, and cover versions of Simon and Garfunkel songs. When the cassettes were not playing, Greenwood would listen to the noise of the engine and try to recall every detail of the music.[5] He credited his sister, ten years his senior, and his brother Colin with exposing him to rock bands such as the Beat and New Order.[6] "I was never happier," he says, "than when I was in my bedroom as a kid, working on rubbishy computer games."[7]

Greenwood's first instrument was a recorder given to him at age four or five. He took the instrument seriously, playing it into adulthood,[8] and played baroque music in recorder groups as a teenager.[6] He also learnt the viola and joined the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra, which he described as a formative experience: "I'd been in school orchestras and never seen the point. But in Thames Vale I was suddenly with all these 18-year-olds who could actually play in tune. I remember thinking: 'Ah, that’s what an orchestra is supposed to sound like!'"[9] The first gig he attended was the Fall on their 1988 Frenz Experiment tour, which he found "overwhelming".[6]

Along with Colin, Greenwood attended the private boys' school Abingdon School, where he met singer Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien, and drummer Phil Selway and joined their band On a Friday.[10] He had previously been in a band called Illiterate Hands with Nigel Powell and Yorke's brother Andy Yorke.[11][12] The youngest member of On a Friday, Greenwood was two school years below Yorke and Colin[13] and the last to join. He first played harmonica and then keyboards, but soon became the lead guitarist.[13] Greenwood studied music at A-level, where he learnt how to harmonise Bach chorales, a skill he said he still uses.[9]

Greenwood was three weeks into a degree in music and psychology at Oxford Brookes University when On a Friday signed a recording contract with EMI in 1991. He dropped out of university and On a Friday changed their name to Radiohead. The band found early success with their 1992 single "Creep". According to Rolling Stone, "it was Greenwood's gnashing noise blasts that marked Radiohead as more than just another mopey band ... [it was] an early indicator of his crucial role in pushing his band forward."[14] Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), propelled them to international fame, and is often acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time;[15][16][17] it showcased Greenwood's lead guitar work on songs such as "Paranoid Android".[18] For the track "Climbing up the Walls", Greenwood wrote a part for 16 stringed instruments playing quarter-tones apart, inspired by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.[19]

Greenwood performing with Radiohead in 2006

Radiohead's fourth and fifth albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), recorded simultaneously, marked a dramatic change in sound, incorporating influences from electronic music, classical music, jazz and krautrock.[20] Among the instruments used by Greenwood for the album were modular synthesisers (used to build the drum machine rhythm of "Idioteque")[21][22] and the ondes Martenot, an early synthesiser similar to a theremin.[23] The albums also gave Greenwood his first opportunity to work with an orchestra, the Orchestra of St John's.[24][25] The only Radiohead member trained in music theory, Greenwood composed a string arrangement for "How to Disappear Completely" by multitracking his ondes Martenot playing.[21] According to Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s longtime producer, the first time the musicians saw Greenwood's score "they all just sort of burst into giggles, because they couldn’t do what he’d written, because it was impossible — or impossible for them, anyway."[26] Greenwood said that the orchestra leader, John Lubbock, encouraged the musicians to experiment and work with his "naive" ideas.[27]

In 2003, Greenwood released his first solo work, Bodysong, the soundtrack for the documentary of the same name, featuring his brother and Radiohead bandmate Colin on bass. The soundtrack includes guitar, classical music, and jazz.[26] In March 2004, Greenwood's first work for orchestra, Smear, was premiered by the London Sinfonietta. In May, he was appointed composer-in-residence to the BBC Concert Orchestra, for whom he wrote "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" (2005), which won the Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards.[34] The piece was inspired by radio static and the elaborate, dissonant tone clusters of Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). He wrote the piece by recording individual tones on viola, then manipulating and overdubbing them in Pro Tools.[26] As part of his prize Greenwood received £10,000 from the PRS Foundation towards a commission for a new orchestral work.[35]

Greenwood composed score for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood by director Paul Thomas Anderson. The soundtrack won an award at the Critics' Choice Awards and the Best Film Score trophy in the Evening Standard British Film Awards for 2007.[36] As the soundtrack contains excerpts from "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", it was ineligible for an Academy Award nomination, which prohibits "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."[37][38]Rolling Stone later named There Will Be Blood the best film of the decade and described the score as "a sonic explosion that reinvented what film music could be".[39] In 2016, film composer Hans Zimmer said the score was the one that had most "stood out to him" in the past decade, describing it as "recklessly, crazily beautful".[40]

Greenwood collaborated with Anderson again on the soundtrack for the film Inherent Vice, released in October 2014; it features a new version of an unreleased Radiohead song, "Spooks", performed by Greenwood and two members of Supergrass.[49] In 2014, Greenwood performed with the London Contemporary Orchestra, performing selections from his soundtracks alongside new compositions.[50]

Greenwood first heard Olivier Messiaen'sTurangalîla Symphony at the age of 15 and became "round-the-bend-obsessed with it".[3] Messiaen was Greenwood's "first connection" to classical music, and remains an influence; he said: "He was still alive when I was 15, and for whatever reason I felt I could equate him with my other favourite bands – there was no big posthumous reputation to put me off. So I'm still very fond of writing things in the same modes of limited transposition that he used."[30]

Greenwood is a fan of the 80s post-punk band Magazine. He declined an offer to fill in for guitarist John McGeoch, who died in 2004, during the band's 2012 reunion tour. According to Radiohead collaborator Adam Buxton, "I think Jonny was just overwhelmed, cause he's the biggest Magazine fan in the world. He was just too shy, I think. I'm sure he's got all those licks in his locker."[69]

Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and plays instruments including guitar, piano, synthesisers, viola, glockenspiel, harmonica, recorder, organ, and banjo.[70] He said in 2014: "I'm always happiest trying new instruments - and honestly enjoy playing, say, the glockenspiel with Radiohead as much as I do the guitar ... I enjoy struggling with instruments I can't really play."[30]

Greenwood is a prominent player of the ondes Martenot, an early French electronic instrument played by moving a ring along a wire, creating sounds similar to a theremin.[23] The instrument appears on tracks such as "How to Disappear Completely" (from Kid A) and "Where I End and You Begin" (from Hail to the Thief).[30] Greenwood became interested in the instrument at the age of 15 after hearing Olivier Messiaen'sTurangalîla Symphony.[3] He is interviewed by Suzanne Binet-Audet about his affection for the instrument in the 2012 documentary Wavemakers.[71] As original production of the ondes Martenot ceased in 1988, Greenwood had a replica created to take on tour with Radiohead in 2001 for fear of damaging his original model.[23]

"You know, people from my background are made to feel that it’s wrong to have opinions about classical music ... So I found it quite healthy, particularly at school, to think about classical composers and rock bands in the same way. The reason I loved Messiaen, for instance, was that he was still alive and writing. To me that was as exciting as a great old rock band still being around. Same with Penderecki. His strange orchestral music was quite dark, but it felt similar to the strange electronic music coming out of Manchester."

In 2014, Greenwood wrote of his fascination with Indian instruments, particularly the tanpura: "Supposedly they’re just drones to accompany singers but in fact they produce a compellingly complex wall of sound, with layer upon layer of drifting harmonics. I’ve started using some of these instruments in my music because I can’t think of any other way, electronics included, of making such sounds."[58]

For his film soundtracks, Greenwood attempts to keep the instrumentation contemporary to the period of the story; for example, he recorded the Norwegian Wood soundtrack using a 1960s Japanese nylon-strung guitar and recorded it with period home recording equipment, attempting to create a recording that one of the characters might have made.[30] Many of his compositions are microtonal.[30]

Greenwood is a computer programmer and writes software used in Radiohead's music. He became interested in programming when he was young, experimenting with BASIC and simple machine code, and said: "The closer I got to the bare bones of the computer, the more exciting I found it." At the suggestion of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Greenwood began using the music programming language Max. He said: "I got to reconnect properly with computers ... I didn't have to use someone else's idea of what a delay, or a reverb, or a sequencer should do, or should sound like – I could start from the ground, and think in terms of sound and maths. It was like coming off the rails."[72] Greenwood wrote the software Radiohead used to sample their playing for their eighth album, The King of Limbs (2011).[7]

Greenwood's major writing contributions to Radiohead's early records include "Just" (which Yorke described as "a competition by me and Jonny to get as many chords as possible into a song") and "My Iron Lung" (which Yorke co-wrote with Greenwood[73]) from The Bends (1995), "The Tourist" and the "rain down" bridge of "Paranoid Android" from OK Computer (1997),[13] and the vocal melody of "Kid A" from Kid A (2000).[74] The New York Times described Greenwood role as "the guy who can take an abstract Thom Yorke notion and master the tools required to execute it in the real world."[26] Greenwood described his role in the band as arranger: "It's not really about can I do my guitar part now, it's more ... what will serve this song best? How do we not mess up this really good song? Part of the problem is Thom will sit at the piano and play a song like 'Pyramid Song' and we're going to record it and how do we not make it worse, how do we make it better than him just playing it by himself, which is already usually quite great."[8] Asked about working with Greenwood, Yorke said: "Whenever I am tired, he is there and awake."[30]

In 2010, the NME named Greenwood one of the greatest living guitarists.[76] In the same year, he was voted the seventh greatest guitarist of all time in a poll of more than 30,000 BBC Radio 6 Music listeners.[76] In 2011, Rolling Stone ranked him the 48th greatest guitarist of all time,[14] and in 2012 Spin ranked him the 29th.[77] In 2008, Greenwood's guitar solo in "Paranoid Android" was named the 34th best guitar solo of all time by Guitar World.[18] Three of his solos ("Paranoid Android", "Just" and "The Bends") appeared in the NME's 2012 list of the best guitar solos of all time.[78]

In 1995 Greenwood married Israeli-born Sharona Katan, a visual artist whose work (credited as Shin Katan) appears on the covers of Greenwood's Bodysong and There Will be Blood soundtracks.[citation needed] Their first son, Tamir, was born in 2002 and the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief was dedicated to him. They also have a daughter, Omri, born in 2005, and a second son, Zohar, born in February 2008.[citation needed]